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JRebirth Workbench First Step

Today I share a short video about JRebirth Workbench work progression. I have uploaded it on YouTube some days ago but I didn’t blog about it.

I’ve just seen the Tom’s blog entry that demonstrated a really nice tweaked TabPane build with Jonathan and perhaps available soon in OpenJDK (see the blog entry here for more information).

My widget is not as nice as their but the major part of my work is related to integration into JRebirth Component project.

In 2 words you can consider that JRebirth [Core+Component] will do the same job than e4 by using a different approach ( A Model from JRebirth is equivalent to an e4 part).

PS: Some people can ask themselves why (TF***) I’m reinventing the wheel instead of using e4 whereas I’m also an Eclipse developer. The answer is given by the framework’s name itself ! I’m really confident that we can do complex things in a simple way and mainly thread-oriented.

I’m upset to see my Eclipse (IDE and RCP) lagging all the day… (and even crashing, Java8+Luna+m2e+W8 doesn’t work anymore on my laptop… )

I think that my crashes are related to m2e integration because with a Luna out-of-the-box I hadn’t got any trouble (except that I doesn’t have access to maven dependencies).

So to be clear my crashes are NOT related to e4 (just a complex integration into a complex platform).

I should have written ‘eclipse’ instead of ‘e4′. I wroted this sentence just to say that JRebirth is an alternative to e4 (doing aproximatively the same thing even if JRebirth is smaller and not linked to a big platform like eclipse).

JRebirth’s aim is to build something new by kicking away all old code but by modestly getting inspiration from it.

This is what e4 did as well – get inspired but a rewrite from scratch – the e4 application platform although is not designed to run on Tablets / Phones. Running on a pi is no problem at all – but it enforces loose coupling so you should be able to reuse your components fairly anywhere!

Coming from eclipse 3.x, e4 migration seems to be really complex and this is a reason why it isn’t widely adopted yet (at least in my city area).
I didn’t play a long time with e4, but I had some problems to find right documentation and effective tools (especially to edit the big xmi file, even by seeking Lars’ tutorials).

Things have probably changed (I will probably attend to Olivier’s e4 workshop at ECF 2014 to review my thought) now but when I began JRebirth I was searching an alternative to existing framework to build powerful and light applications.

I got inspiration from PureMVC, MVVM pattern and custom Swing framework I saw last years (and unconsciously also from Eclipse/EMF/GEF/GMF).

JavaFX has appeared as ‘THE’ graphical toolkit to use and 2 years later it’s more obvious.

My conceptual target was to build an embedded application that supports long operation (memory-friendly), don’t lag or freeze (cpu-friendly), and that ease development by doing complex stuff outside developers’ sight. JRebirth is an everyday adventure and I really enjoy it.

I’m currently working on a workbench that will extend JRebirth Model layer.

A future challenge for JRebirth will be to build a nice modular system, Eclipse ecosystem has a great one but it could give some terrible headache when dealing with hundreds of bundles/plugins.

I’ve just found why my eclipse was crashing each time I open a file !
The guilty is sonar-eclipse plugin ! When it can’t connect to remote server it freezes the UI thread probably waiting a timeout.
And my server is not always powered on (energy savings) so the solution is to remove the server from their configuration panel.